Fluent Essays

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Every assignment should contain at least two references.  · Readings: · Phonetics and Phonology - Chapter 3  · PDF:  Teaching Pronunciation--Consonants (pp. 28-30)   · Web:  Sounds of American English: Audio & IPA Transcription Wk3 DQ1 one page Describe one (1) of the following signals of stress” (Gilbert), indicating how you might incorporate this signal when teaching pronunciation in an ESL/EFL classroom: vowel length; vowel clarity; pitch change.  Wk3 DQ2 One page Select one (1) of the major consonant types from the reading --e.g. glottal stops, fricatives, liquids--and explain why this type of sound may be difficult for English L2 learners to duplicate. You may wish to use a specific L1 student population as the basis of your discussion. Teaching Pronunciation Using the Prosody Pyramid Judy B. Gilbert cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2008 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2008 Printed in the United States of America isbn-13 978-0-521-98927-5 paperback Book layout services: Page Designs International Table of Contents Introduction 1 1 The Functions of Prosody 2 2 The Prosody Pyramid 10 3 The Prosody Pyramid and Individual Sounds 21 4 Ideas for Implementing the Prosody Pyramid 31 Appendix 1: Pronunciation FAQ 42 Appendix 2: Focus Rules and Thought Group Rules 45 Appendix 3: How Often Do the Vowel Rules Work? 47 Appendix 4: Table of Figures 48 References 49 Introduction 1 Introduction Teaching pronunciation involves a variety of challenges. To begin with, teachers often find that they do not have enough time in class to give proper attention to this aspect of English instruction. When they do find the time to address pro- nunciation, the instruction often amounts to the presentation and practice of a series of tedious and seemingly unrelated topics. Drilling sounds over and over again (e.g., minimal pair work) often leads to discouraging results, and discour- aged students and teachers end up wanting to avoid pronunciation altogether. There are also psychological factors that affect the learning of pronun- ciation in ways that are not so true of studying grammar or vocabulary. For one thing, the most basic elements of speaking are deeply personal. Our sense of self and community are bound up in the speech-rhythms of our first language (L1). These rhythms were learned in the first year of life and are deeply rooted in the minds of students. Therefore, it is common for students to feel uneasy when they hear themselves speak with the rhythm of a second language (L2). They find that they “sound foreign” to themselves, and this is troubling for them. Although the uneasiness is usually unconscious, it can be a major barrier to improved intelligibility in the L2. A teacher can help overcome this psychological barrier and other challenges by thinking of the goal of pronunciation instruction not as helping students to sound like native speakers but as helping them to learn the core elements of spoken English so that they can be easily understood by others. In other words, teachers and students can overcome the frustrations, difficulties, and boredom often associated with pronunciation by focusing their attention on the development of pronunciation that is “listener friendly.” After all, English pronunciation does not amount to mastery of a list of sounds or isolated words. Instead, it amounts to learning and practicing the specifically English way of making a speaker’s thoughts easy to follow. This booklet presents an approach to pronunciation that highlights the interrelatedness of various aspects of English speech. The approach addresses the individual elements of pronunciation but always within the framework of a larger system that uses all these individual elements to make speakers’ ideas clear and understandable to their listeners. 2 Teaching Pronunciation 1 The Functions of Prosody Communication in spoken English is organized by “musical signals.” There are two aspects to these signals – rhythm and melody – and the combination of these two aspects may be called prosody. Often, the term prosody is used to mean rhythm alone, while the term intonation is used to refer specifically to melody (or pitch patterns). However, in this booklet, prosody will refer to the combina- tion of both rhythm and melody. The reason is that for the purposes of teaching pronunciation, the teacher needs to understand that both these aspects of spo- ken English work together and are vitally linked. The term prosody provides us with a handy way to refer to the interconnected aspects of rhythm and melody with a single label. Rhythm and Melody as Road Signs In English, rhythmic and melodic signals serve as “road signs” to help the lis- tener follow the intentions of the speaker. These signals communicate emphasis and make clear the relationship between ideas so that listeners can readily iden- tify these relationships and understand the speaker’s meaning. Unfortunately, when English learners speak in class, they are typically not thinking about how to help their listeners follow their meaning. Instead, they are often thinking about avoiding mistakes in grammar, vocabulary, and so on. Native speakers also commonly make this error when delivering a presentation or when read- ing aloud in a classroom, a business meeting, or in some other setting. They become preoccupied with making “mistakes” and may ignore their listeners altogether. But it is particularly important for English learners to think about their listeners and master the rhythmic and melodic signals essential to “listener- friendly” pronunciation. Learners typically do not use or recognize the cues that native listeners count on to help them follow meaning in a conversation. As a result, con- versational breakdowns occur. Emphasis that conveys the wrong meaning, or thought groups that either run together or break in inappropriate places, cause extra work for the listener who is trying to follow the speaker’s meaning. If the burden becomes too great, the listener simply stops listening. The principle of “helping the listener to follow,” therefore, is a vital one. It is so central to com- munication, in fact, that time spent helping students concentrate on the major rhythmic and melodic signals of English is more important than any other efforts to improve their pronunciation. Teaching Pronunciation 3 Melody All languages have some way to highlight the most important piece of informa- tion in an utterance. They all have a way to help listeners distinguish between old information and new information and thereby draw the listener’s atten- tion to that piece of information that is new, and therefore, more important. But few languages rely on melody for this function as much as English. In English, changes in pitch help listeners follow the speaker’s meaning because these melodic signals provide cohesion and contrast. Not only do they tell listeners what is new information, but they also tell listeners how ideas relate to each other. They help listeners to understand how the speaker intends to make connections with what came before (orientation) and what will follow in the conversation (prediction). Efficient listening comprehension, therefore, depends on the ability to “read” melodic cues in order to sort out these aspects of the incoming lan- guage. The orientation aspect helps listeners to clue into what must have been assumed, and the prediction aspect helps listeners to find out quickly if they have misunderstood the point of the conversation. In addition, these aspects are similar to the skills needed to be an efficient reader (e.g., to recognize the significance of furthermore or on the other hand which are “road signs” for the reader). But in spoken English, the “road signs” are prosodic! Consider the following example sentences. Example a. Jane said, “Is that Mister Fogg?” b. Jane said, “Is that mist or fog?” Question: What was Jane talking about? (Gilbert 2005, 136) In sentence (a), Jane is asking about a person. In sentence (b), she is asking about something altogether different, the weather. In terms of pronunciation, however, the only difference between the two utterances is a melodic one. The pitch pattern of each sentence distinguishes it from the other and makes the meaning clear for the listener. Rhythm Children learn the rhythm of their L1 very early in life. By the time they reach the age of one, that rhythm is deeply familiar to them, and they will uncon- sciously apply it to any L2 that they learn (Aoyama et al. 2007). Since English learners will be predisposed to use the rhythm of their L1, it is highly important that they be made consciously aware of the English system of rhythm. 4 Teaching Pronunciation The basic unit of English rhythm is the syllable. A syllable is most simply explained as something with a vowel sound at its center. And while the number of syllables in a word is usually obvious to a native speaker of English, learners accustomed to different phonological rules may not hear the syllable divisions in the same way. Since this seriously affects both intelligibility and listening comprehension, time must be spent training students’ ears to notice the number of syllables in the words they learn. For instance, students should be taught to count syllables and thereby notice the rhythmic difference between words in pairs, such as ease and easy, or wait and waited. Notice in the picture of a school bus in Malaysia below that the English word school has been re-syllabified to fit the Bahasa Malaysia language (sekolah), which does not allow a final /l/ sound. That is to say, the word has been transformed into 3 syllables, rather than the English version, which is one syllable. Another common source of added syllables is that consonant clusters are not allowed in many languages and yet occur very often in English. This can cause systematic errors in pronunciation based on the student’s L1 rules (e.g., eschool or estudent, or even Espanish for Spanish) and can also cause confusion (e.g., parade instead of prayed, and forest instead of first). Figure 1: School Bus in Bahasa Malaysia language Listening comprehension is increased when students learn to notice the rhyth- mic effect of the number of syllables, including small words such as articles, auxiliaries, and affixes (e.g., the; do; -er; etc.). In easily confused words like this is/this and late/later the number of syllables is different, so the rhythm is different. These small words and affixes are typically difficult to hear in spoken English because of the systematic use of contrastive highlighting/obscuring, which is essential to the English stress and emphasis system. For this reason, these small words are often missing from students’ speech (and writing), and this indicates that they are not hearing them well. Teaching Pronunciation 5 Example 1. Yest’day I rent’ ‘car. (Yesterday I rented a car.) 2. Where’ ‘book? (Where is the book?) 3. We’ been here’ long time. (We’ve been here a long time.) But an understanding of English rhythm involves more than the ability to iden- tify and count syllables. It also involves an ability to hear and produce the word stress patterns of English. English speakers tend to store vocabulary items according to their stress patterns (Brown 1990; Levelt 1989). Therefore a stress error is particu- larly damaging to communication. Brown puts it this way: The stress pattern of a polysyllabic word is a very important identifying feature of the word . . . We store words under stress patterns . . . and we find it difficult to interpret an utterance in which a word is pronounced with the wrong stress pattern – we begin to “look up” possible words under this wrong stress pattern. (1990, 51) Only a little imagination is needed to realize that the failure to hear and pro- duce stress patterns accurately could cause confusion between words such as those in the following pairs: dessert/desert foreign/for rain his story/history It might seem that context would clarify any confusion over words like these, but in fact stress errors rarely exist in isolation from other pronunciation or grammatical problems. The combination of stress errors with other types of errors can seriously disrupt communication. For example, the following instance of confusion actually occurred during an English language learning class in the workplace, when a student took the teacher aside and asked for private advice. Example Student: Mrs. Stiebel, can you help me with comedy? Teacher: Comedy? Student: Yes, comedy is big problem. Teacher: I don’t quite follow. Student: (Patiently) Problem – this is worry. Teacher: Yes, a worry. Um . . . you mean you have a problem with comedy on TV? Student: TV? (Trying again) The boss put me on department comedy. Everybody on comedy, all the time argue. Teacher: Oh, you mean committee! Student: Yes, what I told you, comedy. 6 Teaching Pronunciation Although good will and patient attempts to clarify may often help speakers and listeners overcome this sort of disruption, wrong stress is an added burden for listeners and can, in many cases, lead to conversational breakdown. Unfortunately, learners tend to ignore stress patterns when they learn vocabulary. Not only can this lead to pronunciation problems, as in the example above, but it can also lead to problems with comprehension. After all, if learners have failed to learn the stress pattern for a new word, they may also fail to recog- nize that word when it occurs in spoken form. Brown makes this observation: From the point of view of the comprehension of spoken English, the ability to identify stressed syllables and make intelligent guesses about the content of the message from this information is absolutely essential. (1977, 52) The importance of prosodic instruction is further supported by the findings of Derwing and Rossiter. In 2003, they conducted a study on the effects of dif- ferent types of English pronunciation instruction. As part of that study, a group of students was instructed in segmentals (i.e., individual consonant and vowel sounds). They were taught to distinguish between English sounds and produce these sounds as accurately as possible. Another group was primarily taught the prosodic features of English. They learned about the rhythm and melody of English and practiced using the prosodic signals that native speakers use to guide their listeners. The authors comment on their findings: We do not advocate eliminating segment-based instruction altogether, but, if the goal of pronunciation teaching is to help students become more understandable, then this study suggests that it should include a stronger emphasis on prosody. (2003, 14) The Relationship Between Speaking and Listening Comprehension While it may be easy to see the benefit of good pronunciation instruction for increasing intelligibility, it is just as useful for increasing listening comprehen- sion. Students who are taught about English prosodic patterns often report improved understanding of speech on TV, in movies, and in face-to-face con- versation. Why is this? One reason is that prosodically-trained students have learned to understand how rhythmic and melodic cues are used to organize information and guide the listener. Another reason is that these students have learned to notice how prosody changes how words sound. Most English learners who suf- fer from inadequate training in listening comprehension complain that “native speakers talk too fast.” What this often means is that learners are unable to process important grammatical signals, (e.g., past tense markers) or effectively process contracted speech. Contractions and reductions are a normal part of Teaching Pronunciation 7 spoken English. Furthermore, difficulty keeping up with what was said also occurs from the inability to recognize the intonational signals of “what goes with what” or “what disagrees with what.” These signals are an important part of helping the listener to follow (i.e., creating cohesion). An example of miss- ing the signals of grouping would be failing to recognize who is being spoken about in a remark like “John,” said the Boss, “is lazy.” This is a quite different sentence than “John said, ‘The Boss is lazy’.” Aside from intonational thought grouping signals, another reason to miss the point of what the speaker just said is the inability to recognize the implications of emphasis. Emphasis signals what is new, or especially important, as opposed to what is already understood. Cohesion in English conversation depends both on signals of grouping and on the pitch contrast between new information and old information. A dramatic example of “not noticing the implications of empha- sis” occurred at a major point in Francis Coppola’s detective movie “The Conversation.” The detective thinks he heard the beautiful young wife say to her lover “If my husband finds out, he’ll KILL us!” The detective is so worried about the young woman’s safety from her jealous husband that he misinterprets the remark. But later, after the husband’s corpse is discovered, and a small smile is seen on the wife’s face, the detective realizes he had misheard the emphasis. What she had actually said was “If my husband finds out, HE’LL kill US.” The emphasis on pronouns implied something far different from the usual emphasis on a content word (the verb). The two young lovers were not afraid of the husband; they were plotting a murder. The individual sounds of spoken English are constantly changed by the communication pressures inherent in the prosody. Put another way, prosody often distorts sounds so much that they are unrecognizable from the sounds of a word when it is said in isolation. For example, to find out how a word is pro- nounced a learner will often look in a dictionary. But it is important to realize that actual pronunciation of that word may be dramatically changed depend- ing on its importance to the speaker at a particular moment. In actual speech, words run together, consonants or vowels disappear or change in sounds all in relation to the prosody pressures. Also, the word stress pattern as indicated in the dictionary is actually only a “potential” stress pattern; the potential is acti- vated in specific contexts, but it is not necessarily realized in every context. So if students depend on the “dictionary pronunciation” of words, they will likely fail to recognize a spoken vocabulary item when they hear it, even though they “know” the item in print. In fact, they do not really know the word until they can identify it in actual speech. Brown explains the problem this way: From the point of view of understanding ordinary spoken English, the failure to move beyond the basic elementary pronunciation of spoken English must be regarded as disastrous for any student who wants to 8 Teaching Pronunciation be able to cope with a native English situation. If the student is only exposed to carefully articulated English, he will have learnt to rely on acoustic signals which will be denied him when he encounters the normal English of native speakers. (1977, 159) Her point, at least in part, is that the individual sounds of words are affected by the surrounding language, and often are said quite differently than an English learner depending on the dictionary would expect. For this reason, effective listening comprehension is greatly enhanced by learning (through explanation and adequate practice) how the sounds actually change according to the pro- sodic influence of the speaker’s intentions. The focus of English pronunciation instruction, therefore, should be to give learners the prosodic framework within which the sounds are organized. Instruction should concentrate on the way English speakers depend on rhythm and melody to organize thoughts, high- light important words, and otherwise guide their listener. In addition to helping learners understand words in context and to recognize prosodic “road signs” in spoken English, instruction about prosody also helps learners develop improved ability to clear up misunderstandings in the middle of a conversation. This is because when learners understand how prosody affects sounds and meaning, they are made more aware of poten- tial sources of confusion in conversation. When there has been a breakdown, instead of focusing strictly on pronouncing individual sounds correctly and not making grammatical mistakes, they are able to identify prosodic elements that may have sent a wrong signal. Further, students can make adjustments to rhythm and melody and correct the sounds in the most important syllables in order to correct the confusion. Since correction of a conversational breakdown has to be rapid, knowledge of the prosody system gives students the tools to efficiently scan what was just said and make a quick repair. Conclusion Without a sufficient, threshold-level mastery of the English prosodic system, learners’ intelligibility and listening comprehension will not advance, no matter how much effort is made drilling individual sounds. That is why the highest priority must be given to rhythm and melody in whatever time is available for teaching pronunciation. If there is more time, then other lower priority topics can be addressed (e.g., the sound of the letters th, the difference between the sounds associated with r and l, etc.), but priority must be given to prosody. Teachers are often hesitant to tackle rhythm and melody in class because these topics are perceived as complicated and full of nuance. Textbooks on the subject tend to be intimidating because they present so many rules. However, while intonation analysis can get very complicated, teaching a thresh- old level of understanding of the core system is actually quite simple at its most basic level. Teaching Pronunciation 9 If there is only time to teach awareness of the core system and practice these vital rhythmic and melodic cues, as well as certain critical sounds (e.g., the grammar cues at the end of words), students will have achieved a great deal of communicative competence. But if these prosodic cues are not taught, then efforts at achieving communicative competence by drilling individual sounds will prove frustrating. After all, practicing pronunciation by focusing only on individual sounds is like using only part of the language. As one teacher trainee put it after training course, “Practicing pronunciation without prosody is like teaching ballroom dancing, only the students must stand still, practice without a partner, and without music.” 10 Teaching Pronunciation 2 The Prosody Pyramid The English prosodic system can be illustrated visually with a pyramid shape. We will call it the Prosody Pyramid. The base of the system is the thought group. This is a group of words that may be a short sentence, a clause, or a phrase within a longer sentence (Chafe 1970, Bolinger 1989, Brown 1990, Cauldwell 1992). Within that base unit, there is a focus word – the most important word in the thought group. Within the focus word, one syllable is given the main stress. That syllable functions as the peak of information within the thought group. It is sometimes called the nucleus, or the peak. The sounds in this syllable must be clear and easily recognized, because this is the center of meaning of the thought group. All the processes of spoken English work together to make this syllable easy for the listener to notice and recognize. While the various levels of pronunciation are interdependent, they will be more easily understood if separated and presented one step at a time. In the sections that follow, we will consider each level of the Prosody Pyramid in turn and explain how each level relates to the others. THOUGHT GROUP FOCUS WORD STRESS PEAK Figure 2: The Prosody Pyramid The Thought Group Perhaps the most important way that English speakers help their listeners to follow their meaning is by grouping words so that they can be more easily processed. The stream of talk in English does not flow smoothly; it is composed of a series of brief spurts. Interestingly, when native speakers listen to English Teaching Pronunciation 11 speech, they do not generally notice this intermittent quality. Rather they get an impression of smooth continuity. But this seeming stream is really made up of longer and shorter chunks. These chunks of speech are the organization of the speaker’s thoughts into groups. As mentioned earlier, a thought group of words can be a short sentence, a clause, or even a phrase. While, the English system for grouping words seems logical to native speakers of English, many languages either do not rely on the same signals to indicate thought boundaries, or they put the boundaries in different places (Ballmer 1980). In written English, punctuation is used to help readers separate thought groups. For instance, in the following example a comma and a period are used to mark the end of each thought group. Example Danny arrived late, so he missed half the movie. Not only does written English use punctuation as an aid, but readers can always reread a piece of text if they become confused about the organization or group- ing of information. But in spoken English there is neither punctuation nor the opportunity to recheck the words, so listeners must rely entirely on prosodic markers in order to know which words are grouped together. Prosodic Markers for Thought Groups Thought groups generally start on a higher pitch and then drop at the end. To clearly mark the end of the group, there are several prosodic signals: (a) a pause (b) a drop in pitch (c) lengthening of the last stressed syllable (the most subtle signal) In slow speech, the pause is the most obvious indicator that a thought group has ended. But during rapid speech, there is no time for pauses, so pitch drops are essential signals. Example (from Gilbert 2005, 132) In general, a pitch drop means “the end,” and there is a relationship between the degree of finality and the size of the drop. For instance, a slight drop in intonation typically marks the end of a thought group within a sentence; a 12 Teaching Pronunciation bigger drop marks the end of a sentence or an entire comment; a major drop indicates, “I have finished my remarks, and it is now your turn to speak.” In a more subtle (but equally systematic) way, spoken English uses the lengthening of the final stressed syllable in a thought group to signal the end of that group. This lengthening may exist in order to give time for the pitch drop (Lehiste 1977, 260), which helps the listener to notice that the thought group is finished. Teachers sometimes ask for rules to give their students about how to decide where to begin and end a thought group. Although linguists have been studying this question for decades, no one seems to have developed rules that are sufficiently simple and practical for language learners. Instead of attempting to teach complex rules, it is far more useful to help students learn to hear the signals of thought grouping and think about grouping in their own speech. One way to build awareness of thought group boundaries is to have students analyze a piece of recorded speech to determine where the thought groups begin and end. When students work in pairs or in small groups to analyze a dialogue or a paragraph, their individual choices about grouping will likely be different. Nevertheless, awareness of the concept is raised when they have to explain their choices about how the words are grouped. The Focus Word Every English thought group has a focus word. This is the most important word in the group. It is the word that the speaker wants the listener to notice most, and it is therefore emphasized. To achieve the necessary emphasis on the focus word, English makes particular use of intonation. The basic principle at play when emphasizing a focus word is contrast. Notice the drawings in the Figure below. Figure 3: Illustrates emphasizing a focus word (from Gilbert 2005, 44) The butterfly in the picture on the right is easy to see because it is highlighted, and the rest of the drawing is shaded. The butterfly in the picture on the left blends in with the rest of the drawing and is therefore difficult to see. Intonational emphasis, when properly applied in a thought group, highlights Teaching Pronunciation 13 the focus word so that it stands out, leaving less important information in the thought group to fade into the background. Emphasis and De-emphasis Since other languages use other signals to call attention to the important idea in an utterance, learners of English as an L2 often do not notice this specifically English system for signaling emphasis. Because the English system of sentence emphasis may be quite foreign to student intuition, it helps to present a set of basic rules about how this system works. Several simple focus rules are presented in Clear Speech (Gilbert 2005), and those rules are reproduced in Appendix 2 of this booklet. Among these rules is the basic principle that the focus word in a thought group is usually a content word (i.e., a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective). Content words …